Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  I had decided to open up my own place, but I couldn’t afford the Village. Some people I knew who lived uptown suggested I look around Yorkville. A realtor showed me an Austro-Hungarian mom and pop operation called Gambrino’s on Second Avenue with long kitchen tables. It had a big fan, no air conditioning, but it was a good-looking place. I thought, I’ll take a chance and start a Village-type place like Portofino’s here.

  When I opened in April 1963, there was nothing much in the neighborhood. Park Avenue and East End Avenue were posh, but in between it was working class, where the chefs, the cooks, the nannies, the people who ran the fancy households lived. If Greenwich Village was the creative heart of the city, this area was nowhere.

  But I knew a lot of people from working in the Village, and one by one they started to come in. One of the first was the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. She lived a little farther downtown and would go to the Stork Club and those kinds of places, but she had no place to meet people and hang around uptown. The theater people from the Village came in: Jose Quintero, Jason Robards, the people who were doing the Beckett plays in the Cherry Lane Theater. Liz Smith came. I knew her from downtown. We were a destination restaurant from the start.

  It jelled pretty fast. Writers and cartoonists from the New Yorker started to come in. George Plimpton and Arthur Kopit, Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw—they’d work all day and all night and then they’d remember, “Oh, I forgot to eat,” and they’d come over, meet their friends, sit down, and have dinner. Pete Hamill, Frank Conroy, Joe Heller, Dan Jenkins, Mike Lupica, William Styron—they all came here. Many of them weren’t famous yet. Some knew each other, a lot of them I introduced. It wasn’t just sitting down for dinner. Elaine’s became a kind of network, a way people met.

  A table up front was called the “writers’ table.” The waiters would put tops on, it would get bigger and bigger. Early on when many of these writers didn’t have money, one guy would take all the checks, and it would be his chit. He’d pay me when he could.

  After a few years I needed extra room so I bought out the TV repair store next door. I needed an air conditioner, better stoves, better refrigeration. I had to make improvements, change the lights, replace the chairs. But everything had to come out of the cash register because as a woman, I couldn’t get money from a bank.

  But it was always like a big reunion, a big party. Jackie Gleason came in when he was doing a picture with Art Carney. “This is my place,” he said. “There’s nothing left like it.” Frank Sinatra would walk in the door and start yelling, “Where’s Mama?”

  Early one morning, about one a.m., a bunch of us were sitting around and talking, the bartender was wiping down the bar when suddenly he stopped and said, “Elaine, Jackie Kennedy is outside.”

  I said, “Come on, stop carrying on.”

  He said, “No, she’s outside.”

  We got up and went to the door, and there she was like a princess in a gold boucle Chanel suit with a big emerald sunburst on it. Mike Nichols and Richard Avedon, Adolph Green and Susan Sontag and Lenny Bernstein were with her. This was after President Kennedy was killed; Jackie was still in mourning. They came in and we made big antipastos. We had the music going; everybody was working to cheer her up.

  Some time ago, a woman came here for dinner. Afterwards her mother told her, “Oh, Grandpa had a place there.” It turned out this woman’s grandfather had owned a wine store on the site of Elaine’s back in 1918. I guess we’ve come pretty far. “It’s a bit of all right,” as they say.

  TOM SLATTERY: About ninety percent of the taverns in the City of New York used to be owned by Irish people; the Italians opened up restaurants. Before the El came down, there used to be neighborhood saloons all along Third Avenue: Clancy’s, Blarney Stone, P. J. Clarke’s. Music would play from the jukebox. People drank bottle beer and Scotch—usually J&B or Dewar’s in a shot glass, three quarters of an ounce for forty, fifty cents. The Irish saloons in the postwar years were places where a person who wasn’t an executive could afford to eat. A White Rose, a Killarney Rose, McCann’s, Martin’s—they were all over town. They served roast beef, pastrami, corned beef, brisket of beef, boiled or mashed potatoes—French fries didn’t come in until later on.

  In 1963, after I retired from the police force, I went into business with some family members in a bar and restaurant called Donahue’s on 31st and Third. It was a great opportunity because the El was gone by this time, and the area was gentrifying. It used to be like Hell’s Kitchen on the East Side, blue-collar workers, some unemployed people, a rough crowd. Many good families but also some problem people who had gone to jail, who liked to throw their weight around the neighborhood and get into fights at local bars.

  But now, the neighborhood saloons, the “buckets of blood” were closing down, and new pubs and restaurants like Donahue’s were coming up. We’d still have a fight every night and two on Friday. It was friends of this family against friends of that family. Four, five times a week, sometimes even the same night, I’d leap over the bar. “Outside,” I would yell. “There’ll be no fighting in here.”

  I can remember when it used to be a neighborhood crowd with thirty customers a night, and the fourth drink always being bought by the house. By the late 1960s, however, the East Side had become a singles scene, and the whole atmosphere had changed. Bartenders became snappier, speed became important, and the shot glass got in the way. The freehand pour became in vogue. Then they came out with measured pourers that would stop and flow, stop and flow. Controlled beverage pouring became an industry in itself because with the crowd, the volume, you had to expedite more.

  MICKEY ALPERT: You’d go into Sardi’s at 11:15, the place would be jammed. The theater didn’t start until 8:30, so the shows ended after 11:00. The jazz joints on 52nd between Sixth and Seventh would stay open until the bars closed about four in the morning. There were all these late-night places like Monte Proser’s La Vie en Rose, the Blue Angel, Julius Monk’s Upstairs at the Downstairs, the Astor Bar, Vincent Lopez and his band at the Taft Hotel. There was the Maisonette at the St. Regis where Mabel Mercer used to play. She was an old lady then and would sit in an easy chair and sing.

  MARGARET WHITING: Hotels were known for their supper clubs. There was the Persian Room at the Plaza and the Starlight Room of the Waldorf, where you had dinner and saw a show. Audiences were more subdued there than in the nightclubs, which attracted racketeers and a more raucous, spirited crowd.

  The Copacabana and the Latin Quarter were the two big ones. People came there to have a good time and dressed to the nines. They had the best entertainers. Everybody who was on the nightclub circuit would get booked there for two or three weeks. There was a twenty-two-piece band, dancing girls, one show about 8:30 and another about 11:00.

  I appeared at the Copa with Joe E. Lewis, but I also went there to see others perform: Martin and Lewis, Phil Silvers. Sinatra played the Copa often, so did Tony Bennett. It had a Brazilian motif, a bunch of trees, tables all over the place.

  I sang the songs people expected to hear me sing: “Moonlight in Vermont,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Tree in the Meadow.” Walter Winchell was very nice to me; he put me in his column all the time. Once the Copa fired me, although I never knew why. He put something about it in his column, and I was back the next day.

  There was a girl who came along from Honolulu. Someone suggested we get together and try to do a show. We never did get to do a show, but we took a liking to each other. “I think I have made an opportunity for myself. I am going to be in a Broadway show with Zero Mostel,” she told me. That was Bette Midler, and the part she got was one of the daughters in Fiddler on the Roof.

  She was doing well as a singer in the nightclub circuit when sometime around 1970 she got a phone call from one of her acting teachers. A man named Stephen Ostrow had seen her perform at the Improv and wanted her for an eight-week engagement at the Continental Baths in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper Wes
t Side. That made her career.

  Originally the Continental Baths had been a municipal bath, but for years it had been a gay bathhouse. It was a huge space with white tiles, a big swimming pool, steam rooms, and an area where you could see shows. The men came out of the pool wearing only white towels, sat down, and watched her perform. They adored her.

  It became the greatest nightclub. We all did it. Even opera singers performed there. Straight couples, dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns, became part of the audience. But for me, the gay men were one of the great audiences of all time. They loved the music. They were artistic. They had feeling and heart.

  RUSSELL BERG: In 1964, I went with my college roommate to his aunt and uncle’s apartment in Lincoln Towers, which had recently opened. Two elderly men, or so it seemed to me, joined us for dinner. But then, in the middle of things, they got up and left, which I thought was kind of weird. The next day when my friend called his aunt to thank her, she said, “Did you know who our friends were?” It turned out they were Morris Carnovsky and another major star of the Yiddish theater, and they were in makeup. They had left so abruptly to make a curtain.

  KEN LIBO: In the 1960s, the Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue was still barely subsisting. When you entered the Yiddish Anderson Theater, you felt like you entered an enormous old-age home because it looked like the actors were nurses and they wanted to be sure that the audience was comfortable, that the oxygen was flowing. They would improvise skits. One in particular I thought was very funny was when a leading lady fell flat on the floor, prearranged, and the actor turned to the audience and said in Yiddish, “Look what happened, my prima donna has fallen on the floor. Is there a doctor in the house?”

  And then a woman who was a plant on the balcony yelled in an enormous voice, “Give her an enema.”

  The actor on the stage ignores her and turns away. Again she yells, “Give her an enema.”

  He yells back, “Lady, it wouldn’t help.”

  And the lady yells back, “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  Well I’d never been in a theater like this. I didn’t know what to make of it. But the audience was very amused. This was the last gasp of the Yiddish theater. They were no longer doing Shakespeare in Yiddish.

  ANNE BERG: In the mid-1960s when the Yiddish theater declined, some of the downtown theaters were transformed into rock ’n’ roll concert halls. The Second Avenue Theater became the Village Theater. Then it closed down for renovation, although when it opened as the Fillmore East it didn’t look very different to me.

  I used all my baby-sitting money to buy tickets because through my high school years, I spent every weekend at the Fillmore East or at Café au Go-Go in Greenwich Village, a much smaller place. I lived in Croton-on-Hudson, but my dad worked for the railroad so I could travel back and forth for nothing. We saw everybody from B. B. King to Eric Clapton to the very first performance of Blood, Sweat & Tears and every other rock ’n’ roll act that you can think of.

  Here I was one night in my green vinyl skirt—I made all my own clothes in high school, one outfit more outrageous than the other—sitting in the front row with my feet up on the stage. Eric Clapton was on. I was wearing braces with orthodontic bands to move my jaw. I opened my mouth, and one of these rubber bands shot into his enormous Afro. “Oh, dear,” I thought to myself, “I can’t interrupt him in the middle of a song and pick it out.”

  MICKEY ALPERT: The Broadway chroniclers wanted to see what the young people were doing, and that was why Earl Wilson and Leonard Lyons made Arthur’s—the first chic discotheque in New York—their next-to-the-last stop of the evening. It was where the original El Morocco with the zebra skins used to be and where the Citicorp Building is today. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore from the show Beyond the Fringe started it in the 1960s, and Sybil Burton, who had just broken up with Richard Burton, fronted it.

  Arthur’s was small and dark, no windows, and no live music. The musicians union was very angry; they said places like this would put musicians out of business. But it was something new, a different kind of dancing, a different kind of music. And Studio 54 was on the horizon.

  Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell turned this old opera house on 54th between Broadway and Eighth into a discotheque in the mid-1970s. Ian Schrager was one of the most gifted men I ever met for his visual skills—every night was a visual experience, freaky, outlandish, beautiful. Maybe fifteen hundred to two thousand people would come in the course of a night, including celebrities like Mrs. Lillian Carter, the Shah of Iran and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, Candace Bergen. The next day their pictures would be in the paper. It became an international institution.

  This was a much different New York than the one I knew as a kid, when I would come in with my parents from Brooklyn to see a Broadway show like Pajama Game or New Girl in Town. There were so many of them.

  At that time Broadway music was the popular music of the time. You turned on the radio and that was all you heard. Guys like Burton Lane, Richard Rodgers, Alan Jay Lerner, Jerry Herman, Frank Loesser, Yip Harburg, Cy Coleman—they made a career that lasted years and years.

  LEONARD KOPPETT: Theater was the center of life and glamour in New York until the late fifties, early sixties. Everyone could still afford a ticket to a Broadway play.

  MERLE DEBUSKEY: As a kid, I had heard Winchell on the radio and read his columns. It seeped into my consciousness so I knew there was such a thing as ‘The Great White Way,” that there was great theater in this country. My image of Broadway was that it was a romantic place, a broken heart for every light.

  After the war, I came to New York and took graduate courses at the New School, where I fell in with a crowd that was interested in creating a cooperative theater. We used to hang out in the Village, where for twenty cents you could kill a night over a couple of beers, arguing and talking and making yourself seem interesting, if not important. I had had some theater-related publicity jobs. So when these people fired their press agent and asked if I was interested, I decided to do it.

  I did publicity, but I also painted scenery and was an extra when necessary. We decided to work in a studio, to affect a style something like the Group Theater. A schism developed among us, and the group split in two. The one I went with included Kim Stanley, Gene Sachs, Bea Arthur. We formed a separate company

  The summer of 1949, there were five or more groups operating off-Broadway, although it did not yet have that designation. There was no union arrangement. We played in places like the Provincetown Playhouse, the Cherry Lane. Then we joined forces into a federation we called the League of Off-Broadway Theaters. If people came into your theater, you would give them information about everybody else’s theater. If you wanted to borrow a drop, a prop, you could borrow it from another company.

  At the Cherry Lane, we performed a play called Yes Is for a Very Young Man by Gertrude Stein. All the major critics came. It was the first time they came to an off-Broadway show after the war.

  At Carnegie Recital Hall, the group we had left behind, the Interplayers Group, got raves with an O’Casey play. The others also did very well. But Equity came down and said that their players could not play in our houses. That killed the shows.

  The League got together and decided to do something. The only one who knew anything about publicity was me. We went on the attack. We worked out a small theater formula with Equity that later evolved into the off-Broadway contract. And that was the beginnings of off-Broadway in the postwar years.

  As a result, my name began to appear in the papers. I got a call from the press agent of Cheryl Crawford, a well-known producer in those days. They were going into rehearsal for Regina, a Broadway musical based on a Lillian Hellman play, written and composed by Mark Blitzstein.

  I came to the Martin Beck Theater. Cheryl Crawford was there. The director Robert Lewis was there. And up on the stage was one light shining on a grand piano, and seated was Mark Blitzstein. He then proceeded to perform the whole score. He did all the vocals. It was absolutely fascina
ting; I swallowed it up.

  Regina closed in four weeks. It was too much out of the norm to be popular as a Broadway musical. Crawford did a second play written by the great actor Alexander Knox, The Closing Door. Knox also starred. Lee Strasberg directed. It was a disaster. With all the method acting, no one could figure out what they were supposed to do.

  That was my introduction to Broadway. I was unemployed after eight weeks. But then I got involved with Mike Todd’s Peep Show, directed by Bobby Clark. No more of this serious shit. Instead the epitome of Broadway: beautiful women, expert comics, jugglers. Todd was a Runyonesque character, a guy with moxie, a mug. If you liked mugs, he was great.

  I was called back to work with Cheryl Crawford. We did The Rose Tattoo and Paint Your Wagon—both were very successful, and now I knew what a hit musical was like.

  I was an intimate of Joe Papp’s from the very beginning, before he even decided to produce plays. We used to have great fun. We could sit for hours talking to each other. The idea of free Shakespeare in Central Park—the idea of going out there in this beautiful park, sitting on the grass while the sun goes down and the lights go up and the majestic words of Shakespeare are laid out for you—it was spectacular. Joe Papp had no money, no important education, no important family members, no support system. He had energy and ambition and street smarts. He had to fight for every inch, culminating with the big battle with Robert Moses, which he won.

  Then Joe decided we needed a contemporary theater to go along with it, and we settled on what became the Public Theater, with no money at all. It had just been sold by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to a real-estate developer. We had the Landmarks Commission landmark it. And that was how we got it.